Reflections
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: A vignette from Mirror Mirror, just after Mirror-Spock has been knocked unconscious by Kirk. No pairing.


[A.N. Written for a competition on deviantArt – which I didn't get win, of course :P]

McCoy had always maintained that Spock had a thick skull. Luckily Commander Spock of the Terran Empire was just as blessed as his doppelganger in the other universe – the universe that McCoy and his companions thought of as the real, true, i_good_/i universe. At least, this Spock's skull was obviously tougher than the brittle souvenir animal skull that Kirk had just shattered over his head. The blow had struck him unconscious instantly, but McCoy's hurried ministrations had saved his life. A human would never have survived.

Unconscious on the examination bed in sickbay, this Spock seemed little different from his counterpart. Passive and silent, ashen-faced from the blow to his head, this was just i_Spock_/i as McCoy had seen him in sickbay so many times before. Spock in fancy-dress, Spock with a fake beard – but still i_Spock_/i, with his elegantly pointed ears and angular face and lean, effortlessly healthy body.

That, either Spock would have affirmed, was nothing more than an illusion. The brain beneath that recently healed skull was very different indeed.

The first thing that this Spock was aware of after the crippling blow to his head was the absence of the pain that had exploded through his skull and slammed him into unconsciousness.

i_I am alive,_/i was his first conscious thought. i_And I am apparently well. How curious._/i

He could smell the antiseptic scents of sickbay, and he could feel the imitation leather of the bed under his back, and the residual ache in his skull where the impact had been focussed. He was obviously undergoing treatment in sickbay. He had not been left by his attackers in a crumpled heap on the floor, and the nascent bleed that he was very well aware had blossomed in his brain at the instant of the blow had evidently been halted, and healed.

Again, he thought, i_How curious._/i

A moment of silent attention to what was around him told him all he needed to know for now. He could hear and sense the doctor – and only the doctor – in the room with him. He was agitated and preoccupied, but not particularly wary. He was not yet aware that his patient was conscious, and he was standing close by the bed. Spock could feel the pressure of a hypospray against his arm. Evidently whatever it had contained was what had brought him back to consciousness – and, the dose given, the doctor was about to move away from his side. In that moment, the doctor was at his most vulnerable.

It took only a fraction of a second for the transformation from passive patient to deadly assailant. Spock had been bred in a universe full of threat and deceit, and retaliation had become more of an instinct than a deliberate action to him. Apparently unconscious one moment, the next he was rising from the examination table with careful, measured slowness, in the knowledge that if the doctor attempted escape he would make it no further than that initial pulse of adrenaline through his startled limbs.

It would only take the movement of one hand to the doctor's neck, and a swift, efficient twist to the side, and vertebrae would snap like rotten twigs. No mess. No blood. Just a snap, and an instantly limp and harmless shell dropping to the floor as the flutter of consciousness left the brain. He could kill the doctor and locate the captain and the others with very little loss of time. Killing was an automatic reaction in this universe. Spock himself had killed dozens of men in his path to becoming First Officer of the i_Enterprise/i_. What was one more corpse to his tally?

But curiosity was ever Spock's failing – or ever his saving grace. This time his curiosity was greater than his instinct for death. He had no more hope of leaving this question unasked than the doctor did of escaping him.

'Why did the captain let me live?'

He was hard against the doctor's body, the doctor's wrist clenched in his right hand, the doctor's pulse thudding with human panic against his fingers. McCoy's eyes were wide with a fear he had never learnt to mask, his pupils pinpoints, red human blood spidering through the sclera about the brilliant blue irises.

Spock's fingers moved to the human's face, burnt onto his skin, pressured the force of his mind into the human's weak thoughts. There was no need to say the words, but he said them anyway. They had become a threat by now. Nothing terrified humans like an awareness of a travesty about to occur.

'Our minds are merging, Doctor. Our minds are one. I feel what you feel. I know what you know…'

The barriers, such as they were, tumbled like a child's sandcastle under the swell of the sea.

The instant he entered the doctor's mind time became meaningless. That precise part of his brain that always counted continued regardless, but here, in the free-fall of meld, time was a puppet, a malleable thing, something to be tasted and contorted and looped into his own purposes, and then tossed away like the rind of a fruit.

He sank himself into the tangle of thoughts, identifying the most recent memories and impulses and scrutinising that which was relevant. The doctor's mind was easy to prise open. His purpose, his motivations. His bewildered entry to this world that was so like and so unlike his, and his desperate need to return to his own, to shepherd his companions back to where they were safe. Curious, how a doctor wanted so desperately to deny himself trade…

He shifted his angle, coming closer to what he wanted.

James Kirk was there – Jim Kirk this time… i_Jim_,/i not James Tiberius... Such a difference that softer, single-syllabled name made to the man himself. i_James/i_ Kirk was a brutal, visceral man, led by his passions and little else. But this i_Jim/i_ was a strange, glowing, golden version of his own hardened Kirk, not just a different man, but a man seen through different eyes, all of his motivations and needs and wants filtered through this McCoy's years of observation and friendship.

And it was simple – it was so beautifully simple. The captain had let him live because – to kill was an abomination. Even to kill's one's enemy…

Spock's own eyes opened a little wider at the simplicity of that thought. To kill is an abomination… To take the twisted strands and knots of a sentient being's path through life, and to cut them all off with one sweep of the blade. What person would cut the thread of a tapestry half woven, or stop a novel half-written? What sane person would deny the universe that potential, without thought or purpose?

In the eyes of these men, was he insane?

His curiosity for these other-beings from that other-place was billowing out of control. But no matter… It had taken a fraction of a second to extract that which he needed to know. He had plenty of time to explore this mind whose counterpart so fascinated him in his own universe… And humans were so easy, and so very intriguing… He could not explore James Kirk's mind – but this one was here for the taking.

McCoy. He tasted the name, and every tatter of personality that clung to it. He had never entered _ihis_/i McCoy's mind before, but he knew that wilderness would be nothing like this. He had sensed the outer edges of his thoughts, of course. No sense in being a telepath in this brittle universe without making use of it to gauge enemies and allies and how easily their alliances would polarise. _iHis_/i McCoy carried a faint scent of blood and the crackling carapace of a soul hardened to suffering. This McCoy was soft with pity, jumbled with sensations of antiseptic and pain carried about because it was too hard to let it out, and tissues of hope wrapped about dark, jagged splinters of despair.

_iSo close,_/i Spock thought.

This one was so close to being _ihis_/i McCoy. Spin him about, beat him hard enough and often enough with life's evil, and this one would blend seamlessly into his. As babies, perhaps, gazing milk-mouthed into their mother's eyes, there would have been no difference.

He fell into another place. The timelessness of meld left years and nanoseconds and everything in-between for contemplation, self-scrutiny, self-loathing. He recalled his own infancy, standing on the sunbaked clay of a Vulcan street, the taunts of his classmates cutting into his mind. Returning home, looking up into his mother's eyes, seeing that they were not void of emotion like his father's and his stepmother's, but drained of it.

i_She was a concubine,/_i another voice insisted. i_A captive, a prostitute. Second best to T'Rea, a prisoner on a god-forsaken furnace of a planet. A second-best with a second-best son. No wonder you were always such an insecure son-of-a-bitch./_i

Insecure… The word drifted in his thoughts. Was that how this other McCoy viewed that other Spock? Was that other Amanda also a worn and wearied prisoner on an alien world?

i_I've never met Spock's mother,/_i that other voice said.

Was there a note of mockery in the voice? Had this McCoy recognised the hope in Spock's mind, that tiny sliver of desire to know that that other Spock had not been born of lust and political machinations and a loveless union? There was, perhaps, a little of this world's doctor in that one. He too garnered a spark of satisfaction from needling a wound and watching the patient wince.

i_You bet I do./i_

The voice was becoming stronger inside Spock's head…

i_You bet I get satisfaction from hitting you where it hurts. You're inside my mind, you bastard. /i_Myi _Spock would never do that, in a million years. Never rape a man's mind just to satisfy his curiosity, never kill a man to see how it felt…_/i

i_Never kill…_/i

Those words echoed again in this Spock's mind. A life cut short. Potential wasted. A life warped by cruelty and carelessness. His own life…

The doctor's laughter was like a slap inside his mind. The meld had begun as his own, totally under his own control. His subject, as always, had begun totally under his own control. But this… This was different. Somehow the doctor, the good doctor (a phrase that entered his head as uttered by a beardless, smooth-cheeked other-Spock, that struck him with its aptness in contrast to his own doctor McCoy) – the good doctor had turned the tables, had grasped control, had taken advantage of Spock's curious need to explore and guided that exploration to his own ends.

i_Look at yourself,_/i the voice hissed inside his head. i_Look at what you are. Look at what you've been made…_/i

He looked, feeling himself and exploring himself from the perspective of that other mind. The taste of meat on his tongue and in his throat… The curious feeling as he compressed his grip on a neck and felt life leave a body… The suppressed pleasure he gained when striking his clenched fist against bone wrapped in flesh, when triumphing over the weak and the stupid…

i_All that's an anathema to _/imyi _Spock,_/i the voice hissed, a snake inside his head, a venom coursing through synapses and reordering everything that had previously been natural.

His other self lived in a controlled peace, rather than a controlled hatred of the world around him. Logic was a tool, not a weapon…

i_So how about it, Spock?_/i

The taunting note was still there, but it was an honest question.

i_How about saving lives instead of ending them? How about doing some_ /igoodi _in this world?_/i


End file.
